Regarding Sock Sorters:
Can they handle hand-knits?
I am inter-web challenged, so I haven't figured out how to buy your book or look at your stories yet. Just one more reason to learn, I guess. Must meet the Sock Sorters in person.
I guess I could take some iodine.

Tech help to the rescue! I'm pretty sure the sock sorters would excel at hand knits. To find out for yourself, you can find Mother's Little Helpers here. How's that for a plug?

I'm assuming you have a Kindle? If not, you can download the Kindle software for your computer, iPad or iPhone.

GP's book, The Dammerung can be read a chapter at a time via your web browser here or you can buy it for Kindle here.

In other news, for all you old school readers, a real print copy of The Dammerung should be available from Amazon soon! We just need to finish reviewing the proof.

And should any of y'all have read GP's work and really like it and feel so moved, a review on Amazon (if you haven't already done so), would be a great thing to help GP's work get noticed!

Okay, I think I'm done plugging all over this thread. Thank you for reading. Carry on.

The numbers we produced in the lab were of utmost importance to the company’s contracts, contracts that paid my company many millions. Everything hinged on those values the lab produced, and a single mistake could cost tens of thousands of dollars. I had already taught Toodles (repeatedly) how to round numbers, and reminded her many times that we needed numbers to the hundredths place, not the tenths or the thousandths or the occasional blank spaces she left on the paperwork. To make sure one did not write a value in the wrong box of the extensive chart, one used a ruler to line up the particular test with its boxes. Mistakes were not an option, and my bad is a thin apology to a contract that just lost more money in a day that some people make in a year.

It still makes me shiver to think of Toodles’ paperwork. She was unbearably sloppy, mixing up values and connecting entire streams of answers to the wrong test, and then because she was off a line, the fifteen tests beneath it were also wrong and she’d already dumped the sample juice to speed up efficiency so no more tests could be run. She volunteered herself to copy the values from paper to computer, and not expecting a problem, my nicer boss let her because I was high on nitrous at the dentist. Because data entry was boring, Toodles rushed through it and entered four hundred test results incorrectly. Because spot-checking was also boring, she never caught her errors and blithely cried TOODLES and went home for the day. It was decided that she shouldn’t do computer work, and she was offended that my bad did not excuse an innocent mistake.

Intent on increasing our efficiency, she devised more bizarre ways to speed us up. This led to even more mixed up tests and I was flummoxed one evening as I did the computer work to find values on tests ranging between 4 and 5 when the only possible answers were 2-3.99. I had absolutely no idea what she had done to create those answers, and took the problem to the nicer boss in bewilderment. The tests had to be thrown out, apologetic emails sent to the contracts and retests scheduled for the next day that was already packed in the regularly scheduled tests, and my boss sighed.

“Do you know what she did today?” my boss asked. “She walked into Mr. Magazine Time’s office and sat on his magazines as she cried I’m booooorrrrrreeeeed!”
“She can have the work truck,” I said flatly. “I’m driving my own car from now on so I don’t have to listen to her talk about the air sparkle.”

The next morning, I walked into the lab and found it seething with ants again. All the lab equipment had been put away filthy. From then on, I waited for her to drive back to the main office, and then I cleaned everything that she had supposedly done herself. My shifts grew longer and hers grew shorter, and my boss could not get rid of Toodles because she was the wife of the tech guy. Toodles was unhappy about her shortening shift, but she could not be trusted to do anything without direct supervision. Although my boss had far too much on her plate with the busy season, she drove to the lab to retrain Toodles. Finding this ridiculous, Toodles tried to demonstrate her ways of speeding us up for efficiency. The boss quashed her plans and Toodles was furious. She was a lawyer, and this was just a lowly lab tech job that was beneath her, and she stomped out the door for air.

"Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be." Kurt Vonnegut
"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." Douglas Adams
"Moderation sucks." Suse
"Wine is a vegetable." Meaty
"Every decision you make, from what you eat to what you do with your time tonight, turns you into who you are tomorrow and the day after that." Cmdr Chris Hadfield

Tech help to the rescue! I'm pretty sure the sock sorters would excel at hand knits. To find out for yourself, you can find Mother's Little Helpers here. How's that for a plug?

I'm assuming you have a Kindle? If not, you can download the Kindle software for your computer, iPad or iPhone.

GP's book, The Dammerung can be read a chapter at a time via your web browser here or you can buy it for Kindle here.

In other news, for all you old school readers, a real print copy of The Dammerung should be available from Amazon soon! We just need to finish reviewing the proof.

And should any of y'all have read GP's work and really like it and feel so moved, a review on Amazon (if you haven't already done so), would be a great thing to help GP's work get noticed!

Okay, I think I'm done plugging all over this thread. Thank you for reading. Carry on.

Ha- I knew there was a reason I hadn't gotten around to all that downloading of stuff yet. Thank you for catering to your luddite followers, Gay Panda! (although it looks like I ought to get the download for keeping up with your short stories, too!)

http://cattaillady.com/ My blog exploring the beginning stages of learning how to homestead. With the occasional rant.

I was working on Part Six tonight and it STILL pisses me off years later! But here is a Fun Fact about Toodles to hold you for the weekend (edited out of the main story for space): she and her tech guy husband would carpool to work every day, and usually she finished before he did. In the empty space between her clock out and his, did she:

A: Read a book.
B: Do a crossword.
C: Play on her iPhone.
D: Sit in the empty cubicle across from his and whine loudly, "Honey, I'm BOOOOORRRRRREEEEED!" every few minutes.

E: Sat in other people's cubicles to tell them how bored she was.
F: Spoke to her husband in baby talk over the cubicles. He spoke back. In baby talk.
G: Walked around looking for ways to increase efficiency.
(and my personal favorite below)
H: Sat in her car in the broiling heat for the last hour to show her husband how ready she was to go.